DevOpsDays NZ 2019 – Day 2 – Session 1

Cath Jones – The Myth of the Senior Engineer

  • They won’t be able to hit the ground running on Day 1
    • Assume they know everything about how things work at your organisation that is organisation or industry-specific
    • If you don’t account for this you will see problems, stress, high turnover
  • Example: Trail by Fire
    • You get shown the basic stuff and then given your first ticket
  • How do you take organisation knowledge and empower people?
  • Employee Socialisation
    • Helps mitigate problems and assumptions
    • Facilitates communication and networking
    • Allows people to begin contributing sooner
  • Pre-Arrival Stage
    • Let people know what is expected
    • Let existing people kno who is thating and our expectations for them
    • Example: Automatic (wordpress)
      • Asked people in the final stages to complete some (paid) work.
      • Candiatites get better understanding of the company
  • Preparing for Transition
    • Culture-shock
    • How are you like compared to where they came from?
    • The new role compared to their previous one?
    • Come from a place where they were an expert and had lots of domain-specific knowledge to being a newbie
  • The Encounter Stage
    • Mentoring, Communication, Technical onboarding
    • Example: Cohorts of new hires
    • Mentoring: Proven way to socialise Senior engineers. Can be Labour intensive but helps when documentation lacking
    • Share Mentor-ship responsibilities: eg Technical and Organisational mentor seperate
    • Communication: Expectations that company places, how privledged and how transparent?
    • Authenticity: Can people be themselves. Reduces stress
  • Technical onboarding: Needs to take time and do it properly. Allow new people to contribute back to it and make it better.
    • Pick out easy wins or low-hanging fruit so peopel can contribute sooner
    • Have Style Guides and good docs
  • MetaMorphosis
    • Senior Engineers are fully Contributing

Katie McLaughlin – Being kind to 3am you

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